A book to challenge the “idyllic narrative around remote work” and to expose “its pitfalls, obvious and hidden”. Against Smart Working, that is the title of the pamphlet, is meeting with wide success and opening a debate on several levels. It is signed for Laterza by Savino Balzano, a Political Science graduate from Perugia, a trade unionist and essayist long committed to the cause of labour rights.

Balzano, your critique begins with the very definition, which you consider misleading in itself. Why, in your view, is this kind of work not “smart”?

“We live in a society that struggles to question itself, to challenge the mantras imposed by an obsessive, one-way narrative. This is unfortunately a dynamic common to many aspects of our lives, and the world of work is no exception: remote work has been the focus of the current phase. We have to acknowledge that working from home was an important resource in this ongoing parenthesis, reducing the chances of contagion, but the media (and not only the media) went much further: remote work was portrayed as the solution to the health crisis, to the environmental one, as the solution to the age-old problem of traffic (if only Dante, the hero of Johnny Stecchino, had known!), even to the loneliness of household pets, to unemployment in the South and to the depopulation of ghost villages. Some pseudo-intellectual of the sad little left, what unfortunately remains of the left in Italy, has even proposed remote work as the answer to soaring rents: this is the height of the campaigning vigour they are capable of. It is sheer farce, and certain issues cannot be treated with such superficiality: they concern people’s lives.”

Remote work, according to its theorists, would let people organise their lives as they please, avoiding traffic, the clocking-in card, rigid schedules and stress. These are considerable strengths. How do you contest them?

“You will certainly avoid the traffic, as well as the risk of a car accident on your way to work. But at this point I don’t see why we should be so unambitious: we should also point out that, by staying at home, you don’t catch a chill and you avoid the common cold, just as in spring you avoid the pollen that plagues so many Italian allergy sufferers. To think you can spare people the problem of traffic by shutting them up at home is, in my view, insane: I believe we should invest in good alternative mobility. As for the rest, I contest it very much indeed: it is not true, first of all, that ‘smart working’ means freedom. They tell us of workers free to work from anywhere (the seaside, the mountains, a cruise ship, the swimming pool, even from Milan Cathedral), but these are the sort of nonsense the press force-feed us as though we were geese destined for foie gras: the summer holidays are well behind us now, yet I ask readers how many ‘smart workers’ they came across on Italy’s beaches, how many out trekking, how many in the Maldives. It is all rubbish: people are confined at home, alone and monitored down to the smallest detail. The workload grows, it chases you into every corner of your flat, yet you are no longer paid in full for it, because it is now tied to so-called targets. And so stress rises, as does the sense of isolation and subordination, and all of this is compounded by health-and-safety rules far less protective than those laid down for on-site work.”

According to some studies, remote work would increase productivity. In your view, this too is a disadvantage, weighing on the worker’s psychological and physical health instead of improving it. Why?

“I believe productivity matters: if the company does well, jobs are more secure, and in a context of uncertainty like the present one it is important to protect people. What is more, productivity could be an advantage for individuals: if you do in one hour what used to take you two, perhaps you keep that second hour free. But this is precisely the point: we are seeing no trend towards compressing the time spent working and taken away from so-called ‘free’ time (defined as such, of course). People work more, they practically never switch off, and that is why the theme of disconnection is so present both in the popular debate and in the scientific one. The question of productivity, too, deserves closer scrutiny: many of the hours worked remotely go unrecorded, and so we need to understand whether the rise in output is due to greater efficiency or simply to an increase in the hours worked. Then there is another aspect: productivity matters, but it cannot be the priority for the union side (as it would appear to be today, reading the agreements the big organisations sign). At the centre, for a union, there must be people’s well-being, their happiness, their dignity, and the creation of the best conditions for the democratic participation of workers, women and men alike. I would remind you that Luana D’Orazio died because that cursed machine had been tampered with to raise its productivity by 8%.”

In labour law, reality is rarely the one “you see”. And the rules are regularly held in check, partly because of the imbalance in bargaining power. Take the right to disconnect: who really has the “strength” to ignore the emails of an intrusive boss? So you propose the automatic shutdown of devices. An effective idea. Could it succeed?

“I have tried to explore the subject in an essay soon to be published by politica.eu (Disconnection: Between the Formality and Materiality of Labour Rules), in which I try to argue that there must necessarily be two lines to follow. The first is that of automatic disconnection: once the maximum number of workable hours has been reached, it must in practice be impossible to carry on working. Access to the applications must be blocked for the worker, who by continuing to work would even expose himself to the risk of disciplinary proceedings. In addition, a severe system of penalties must be introduced, including criminal liability, for any employer who tries to get around the limit. These are the more ‘straightforward’ measures, but the issue, as you rightly hinted in your question, arises within a far wider context concerning the effectiveness of labour rules, their materiality, their enforceability. Labour rules today are often only on paper, because people are too fragile, worn down as they are by thirty years of casualisation, to demand that they be applied: this is why in 2021 we counted around a thousand deaths at work. You may well grant an employee the right to a safety helmet if he works on scaffolding, but if he is precariously employed with a family to support, he will hardly stand up to an employer who decides not to provide it. We must tackle precarity and restore positions of dignity for the community of labour in our country.”

A key idea of the book is that “smart working” is a deception: the rules it seeks to overcome, such as fixed hours, are in fact a safeguard protecting the worker. And what if all workers (and only they) were given the option to choose remote work? Would that be a good compromise?

“Let me start from the end and pick up the previous question: someone who is precariously employed is never free, because his vulnerability to blackmail distorts the way he expresses his will and hands the other party the chance to extort it. As for working hours, there are two problems: the biggest concerns the maximum working time. In my view it is unacceptable to override the right to have a maximum working time defined: it is the very foundation of employed labour, and to dismantle it would mean exposing our very existence to the risk of living, quite literally, in order to work. Let us stop believing the little fairy tale of merit and of work pegged to targets: those targets will always be set in such a way that they can never be reached. In short, what employer could ever be interested in making us work less? Perhaps the odd enlightened mind may exist, but they remain a rare breed. The second point concerns setting the times of work and of breaks in advance during the day: arranging our time beforehand lets us enjoy it to the full, and if we allow working hours to become as flexible as possible, we will no longer manage to enjoy our free time. Remote work must be properly regulated and must remain marginal (a couple of days a week).”

What are the essential points that modern legislation on the subject ought to contain?

“Look, as things stand the legislation is utterly inadequate, and the recent documents on the matter (starting with the private-sector protocol) are not satisfactory. I wouldn’t know where to begin: it is essential to build in a minimum of working hours, to guarantee the limit on maximum working time, to guarantee the right to disconnect, some shred of health-and-safety legislation that goes beyond the right to be informed, the payment of overtime (which continues to be worked and not recorded), the allowances tied to particular ways of performing the work (take shift work), the meal voucher with which people buy basic necessities, and so on. Then there remain the classic questions of remote monitoring (more relevant, obviously, in remote work) and of the rules governing job duties (remote workers risk becoming utterly interchangeable cogs, regardless of anything else). We are a very long way off, and we are wasting time.”

Is the union in the game? How do you judge the stance of the major unions on the matter?

“Heaven forbid: the union in this country is almost never in the game, and you have no idea how much it pains me to say so. I am a trade unionist, I am immensely proud to be one, and I feel the great responsibility that comes with the mandate I gather from the people I represent; I feel its constitutional weight in my very skin. I was born and raised in Cerignola, the town of Di Vittorio. And yet I have to admit that the union is not on the ball on very many of these points: there is no serious, qualified reflection, no bargaining platforms are put forward, abuses are not resisted. There are exceptions, as always, for instance, the agreements signed in the banking sector were good ones (everything can be improved), but on the whole the picture is bleak: the union today is as mainstream and conformist as politics, perhaps worse.”

If remote work is so advantageous for businesses, why did it never take off before the pandemic? And why, in many sectors, is there now a push to return to the office?

“I would be inclined to ask the very same question of those authors who get so excited about the idea of ‘smart working’ as a new paradigm of work: why, between 2017 (the year the relevant law was passed) and the start of the health crisis, did the phenomenon not explode? If it is so advantageous, so inevitable, why did it not take off wildly before? Quite simply because what they now want is to normalise the remote work we came to know during this latest cursed period: slaves as before, but shut up inside the house. This is the model that appeals to the multinationals and the big corporations. Make no mistake: even in the guidelines mentioned earlier, those for the private sector, it is written plainly that you do not work from wherever you like, but from the place the company deems suitable. As for the return to the office that the big groups are calling for, I disagree: certain developments are never perfectly linear, they express a trend, but that trend may still be marked by temporary and partial steps backward. In many cases it is only a matter of time: the big groups know how to look ahead and how to wait, and, while they wait, they know how to organise themselves.”

Why does remote work risk, as you put it, undermining fundamental principles of the Constitution such as the right to fair pay and the equality of citizens?

“For several reasons: very briefly, let me try to point out a few. First of all, our Constitution identifies a genetic link between work and democracy: in Article 1, certainly, but also and perhaps above all in the second paragraph of Article 3. Remote work, if understood as a new way of working tout court, severs the relationships that must exist within the community of labour: between workers, between workers and their representatives, between workers and human-resources managers, and so on.
This is not good: at the root of every collective dynamic lies solidarity, and solidarity can mature only in a context of lively debate, exchange and reciprocity. Some of it can be done remotely too, and one must be ‘modern’, but it is not enough. Add to this that the weakening of the labour front has consequences for the capacity to press demands (and to counter abuse), with highly negative repercussions for health and safety (Articles 32 and 38 of the Constitution) and for pay (Article 36 of the Constitution). A ‘smart working’ understood as the ordinary, generalised paradigm of how work is performed is not a constitutionally oriented design, let the radical-chic pseudo-intellectuals who infest this boot of a country come to terms with that.”

More broadly, your book also deals with the casualisation of work, of which the new trends are a further acceleration. How has the text been received at the various presentations held so far? What are the main doubts, or confirmations, you have encountered among readers and listeners?

“The book is doing very well and so far has been met with great interest and engagement. I love the pamphlet format: this is not the first time I have used it, and I don’t think it will be the last. I like the idea of the militant book, one that fights on the terrain of culture: many people have joined the struggle and support me. There has been no shortage of constructive, serious criticism: I have treasured it, and it has helped me grow. To be sure, this is a difficult text: remote work has positive externalities that are absolutely undeniable. It is true that you no longer have to face the traffic in the morning, for example, and so many people dwell on these upsides, but what they fail to grasp is that such advantages are never connected to the work itself; they are, rather, the product of the inadequacy of everything that revolves around it. Someone who lived a stone’s throw from their company and who walked to work every morning whistling among the trees will reap no benefit whatsoever from ‘smart working’: we must demand that politics, the institutions and the State be the ones to solve our problems. We cannot take that burden on ourselves by locking ourselves indoors sine die, it would be absurd: at that rate, let us close schools and universities for good (let’s all switch to distance learning); let us close cinemas and theatres (there’s Netflix); let us close the restaurants (there’s Just Eat). Do you have any idea how much carbon dioxide we would save and how much the roads would be decongested? Today these look like proposals verging on psychiatric disorder: I am sure that sooner or later someone will put them forward and, since this is Italy, that proposal will come from the posh drawing-room left (understood as a type, present everywhere). The malfunctioning of our cities cannot be dumped onto the citizen, who has the right to live his own space, to occupy it with his own body, expressing the political meaning, too, of that occupation. And then there is the deafening chorus of political correctness, utterly vicious, hurling insults: Luddite, anti-historical, reactionary. They call you every name under the sun, but it matters little: people understand, and they know how to keep their distance.”

Giovanni Landi